Venison is one of my favourite meats and I always make an effort to buy it whenever I find it because like all game the season is limited. It’s also very good value when you consider I bought a whole leg (shank and all) for €10 in FXB where a similar cut of lamb cost ...

A while back I was reading a post on Honest Food about slow cooking an American wild bulb called Blue Camas that’s very high in an indigestible sugar called inulin. If you cook at a low enough temperature for long enough, you will convert most of this inulin to fructose which vastly improves the taste ...

Chances are if you’ve eaten in any high-end restaurant in the past five to ten years you have eaten food which has been cooked for an extended period of time at low temperatures in a water bath. You also will have guessed the technique I’m talking about is often referred to by the name sous ...

As could be guessed from previous posts I normally have a freezer full of black pudding and I’m always looking for new things to do with it; I knew I wanted to pair the sausage with apples so I took inspiration from the classic flavour combination present in a Waldorf Salad when deciding what else ...

I’ve written before about how the synergy between various ingredients that are high in the umami producing molecules (glumates, inosates and guanylates) works and this dish is another attempt to try to maximise that interaction. Of all cultures Japan has turned working with umami into an artform so I decided to make a noodle soup ...

Roast beetroot and smoked mackerel is a combination I really like, the saltiness of the fish tempers what can be a very sweet vegetable and it’s a great basis for a salad. For this dish though, I wanted to do something a bit different to that and really concentrate on the beetroot whilst still retaining ...

For some reason, I always associate eating fish with summer, maybe because I tend to want lighter food at that time of year and also because I associate good seafood with holidays in hot places; whatever the cause, as it gets colder most people want more filling and hearty cooking and a lightly sautéed piece ...

Naturally, there are a lot of pumpkins around at this time of year but it can be surprisingly hard to find a good one that has decent flavour. For starters, any of the beasts you see in the supermarket are useless as they taste of nothing and are only of decorative value; I generally find ...

It’s the time of year again for wild mushrooms and as you’ll see I’ve been cooking with them quite a bit lately. I’d like to say I went out and picked them all myself but I haven’t because I still don’t know enough to do so with any confidence. Although there aren’t actually many fungi ...

As mentioned recently I got a shoulder of wild boar from the excellent John’s Meat Company in Monkstown: a large 5kg bone-in joint with the sort of marbling that unfortunately has been bred out of commercial pigs. Obviously as it was whole I had to debone the cut myself which was actually fine; I took ...